Monday, September 7, 2009

The wisdom of crowds: the many founders of post-Christian
religiosity

I am here as a representative of the
largest faith community in this country, viz. the ex-Catholics. That is not a
community with a sense of unity and structures of its own, like the Catholic
Church. As a leading unbeliever in this country used to say: “No, freethinkers
don’t need structures of their own. It’s not because diabetics get together in
their own self-help group, that non-diabetics should likewise get together.”
So, I have not been mandated to represent the millions who fall in the category
of ex-Catholics, I am only representative in the sense that I am a typical
case. I am an apostate, I no longer espouse the beliefs I was brought up with.
An earlier generation of ex-Catholics, when they were still a small minority of
the Belgian population, often became anti-Catholic, anti-Christian and
anti-religious with a vengeance. Today’s far more numerous ex-Catholics no
longer have serious accounts to settle with the Church of their childhood.
They, i.e. we, are simply sceptical of its defining beliefs. No hereditary sin
of Adam and Eve, no virgin birth of Jesus, no resurrection.

Not that we reject everything about Jesus. He’s
still popular for some of his sayings, especially when he was being
anti-authoritarian like ourselves, when he went against the stifling weight of
tradition and prejudice. But Son of God, no, most baptized Belgians don’t
believe this anymore. That defining belief of Christianity is doubted now even
by many of those who still go to church on Sundays. I understand that Muslims
likewise venerate Jesus but reject his divine status. This at least proves that
it is possible to be religious and yet not believe in Jesus as the divine
Saviour.

One component that recurs in many though not
all religions is God. People who have had bad experiences with a tough and
authoritarian religion, tend towards a wholesale rejection of religion,
including and especially God. They find something heroic in atheism, like
standing on top of a mountain with no one above you. Or as John Lennon used to
sing: “Above us only sky.” To assert human freedom, they would find it a
crucial point to reject God. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s words: “Si Dieu existe, l’homme est un néant. Si
l’homme existe, Dieu n’existe pas.” Among ex-Muslims, this is still common, e.g. Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes
her discovery of atheism as a liberation.

By contrast, now that Catholicism has lost its
teeth, most ex-Catholics don’t bother to rebrand themselves as atheists or
God-deniers anymore. The anti-authoritarian generation dislikes the idea of a
monarch in the sky, but then He can be redefined as something hazier,
genderless, faceless, a mere “something”. We are the Something-ists. If you ask
us whether we believe in God, we say: “It depends how you define God.”
Tongue-in-cheek, God is still okay, though the old expression “the fear of God”
can now only be used in an ironical sense. Conversely, long-standing atheists
have lately explored the idea of an “atheist religiosity”. Their rejection of
the Pope and of Biblical authority need no longer imply a wholesale rejection
of religion. Or “spirituality” as some insist on calling it, with studied
vagueness.

We learn that Buddhism and some lesser-known
Asian tradition also fall into this category of “religion without God”. That’s
why the Buddha is so popular in modern culture: he reputedly doesn’t want you
to submit to some omnipotent authority in heaven. At the same time, the
millions of modern Westerners who do Buddhist things, like practicing
“mindfulness”, don’t become card-carrying Buddhists. They don’t want to put all
their eggs into a single basket.

It is like in science. Everybody accepts that
many pioneers have contributed to the present state of our scientific
knowledge. Nobody swears by only one of them, nor denies the importance of all
the others. Everybody knows that Aristotle’s work was, by all accounts,
path-breaking, yet his knowledge was tentative and often clumsy. Both these
facts, glorifying as well as belittling Aristotle, are equally true, and
uncontroversial. Of course his work was a tremendous contribution to
science, and of course it was very incomplete, in need of improvement by
others who came after him. Nobody faults him for the immaturity of his
theories, because everybody knows a single man couldn’t have created the whole
edifice of science. Nobody says that Aristotle was the only son of the science
god, nor that he was the seal of the scientists never to be equalled.

A poet has said that after Isaac Newton, “all
was light”, so decisive was his breakthrough in physics. Yet to those who would
dismiss the preceding generations of thinkers and researchers as merely caught
in darkness, Newton admonished that he could only see as far as he did because
he stood on the shoulders of giants, i.e. his predecessors in thought and
research. No scientist would ever say that he received the whole of scientific
knowledge in a flash, devoid of any prehistory nor in need of any additions or
improvements.

In the experience of most moderns, the same is
true in religion. Earlier, a very monarchical view of religion prevailed: one
founder, a single leader with a single book, and the rest are devout and
obedient followers. Or if they aren’t, they are outsiders to and enemies of the
religion. Today, we are evolving towards a more democratic view of religion. It
is open-ended on all sides.

It is open-ended in a geographical sense: valid
religious teachings have originated in many parts of the world. In the colonial
age, Christian travellers were puzzled to find noble people in China, in
Arabia, in Africa and other heathen countries: “How can they be so good and not
be Christian?” And they had qualms of conscience: “How sad that this Chinese
new friend of mine, this thoroughly good man, will have to go to hell because
he isn’t baptized!” Today, ex-Christians and quite a few Christians are
confident that even God hasn’t put all his eggs in a single basket:
non-Christians had been provided with their own Zarathustra, their own
Yajñavalkya, Confucius, Bodhidharma, or Shankara. Post-Christian people quote
from Jesus, Laozi, Kabir or Jalaluddin Rumi with equal respect.

It is open-ended towards the past. Every
teacher was a pupil once. Everyone has a navel as visible proof that he was
born from a mother and is indebted to earlier generations. The Buddha, who is
often venerated by Buddhists as totally unique and original, acknowledged that
he had merely walked the path that all the earlier Buddhas before him had
walked. After him, his tradition spawned equally important masters like
Bodhidharma, Huineng or Dogen. Evolutionary psychology shows that the germs of
religion go back very far. We now know that a sense of morality, of altruism
and fellow-feeling, which religious teachers usually claim as a special merit
of religion, is present already in the higher animal species. Apes already have
an (admittedly very embryonic) sense of religion. Some of you may have seen the
documentary in which a gorilla flares up in anger against a burst of lightning:
he is caught in the act of inventing a personal god behind the phenomenon of
thunder and lightning. Right there, he just thought up a thunder god, like
Jupiter or Indra or Thor. Later mankind has discarded this belief in personal
agents behind the natural phenomena, but it was a step on the way forward and
upward. While it is still controversial here and there to say we have descended
from apes, I dare say that we are, moreover, the pupils of the apes.

Modern religiosity is open-ended towards the
future. More teachers are bound to come, equal in rank with the ancient
teachers. Nobody is the last prophet. We’ve heard that after Mohammed, some
Muslims had a Baha’ullah or a Mirza Ghulam Ahmed. Without going into the merits
of these specific individuals, we can generally say that most people agree that
renewals are called for once in a while, and that even in religion, progress is
made once in a while. Nobody has a monopoly on the road to truth or salvation
in our post-Christian religiosity.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.